John Dennehy discusses the first classic of this issue, and interestingly his discussion relates to what we’re all doing here: blogging. Or rather, finding a way to bring science to a larger audience. In “This Week’s Citation Classic: What Is Life?”, posted at The Evilutionary Biologist, Schrödingers book on mind and matter ‘What Is Life’ is discussed. “Indeed biologists at the time attacked it on account of its naivete and extreme reductionism. The book’s overriding contention was that all of biology could be reduced into chemical and physical laws, a statement that most biologist today will agree with” Despite its focus on the layperson, it had many scientist to cross the disciplinary boundaries.

It’s always fascinating to try out how old our current knowledge actually is, which is exactly what gg did regarding the structure of the nuclear atom. He traced it back to (at least) 1844 in his post Mr. Faraday goes wild ? with atomic speculation! (1844) posted at Skulls in the Stars. “A speculation touching electric conduction and the nature of matter.  Faraday, already a distinguished and even famous scientist, shared some thoughts about the nature of atomic structure, based on the paucity of knowledge that was available at the time.  His observations, though still off the mark according to current understanding, were remarkably forward thinking.” gg evaluates the suggestions made by Faraday, and his conclusion also relates to the value of our beloved Giant’s Shoulders: “In short, hypothesis and speculation are natural parts of the scientific process, and even necessary ones.  An idea which gets people to think about a physical problem in a new and different way can be a stepping stone to a new discovery, even if the idea turns out in the end to be inaccurate”

But it was not only Faraday ‘going wild’, it was gg as well, for he send in another blog article: Who first suggested the nuclear atom?, again posted at Skulls in the Stars. The question here actually is that of on whose shoulders tend to stand: the theorist, or the one who provided the empirical test: “Perrin first proposed the nucleo-planetary model, but never pursued the idea beyond some basic speculations.  Rutherford is rightly given most of the credit for the development of the model, as he supervised the experiments which led to its verification and worked out the rigorous theory behind it”

M P Gururajan presents an article on surface tension, in which he also traces the development of a specific model, the Potts model, for modeling surface tensions: Classics in Materials Science: Potts model and its relevance to simulation of microstructures posted at Materialia Indica. “Like soap bubble solution is is easy to use and provides fundamental insights into surface tension phenomena; but also like soap bubble solution, it can lead to a sticky mess.”

On the importance of the (political) context in which science is ‘made’ Eric Michael Johnson argues “It took the threat of nuclear annihilation between the two greatest powers of the 20th century to solve one of the most profound scientific controversies of the 1800s” He presents an article on “the hypothesis of coral reef formation first proposed by Charles Darwin in 1837″:
Rivalry Among The Reefs found at The Primate Diaries. He concludes: “Ironic though it may be, it took a bitter rivalry between nations to find a solution to the rivalry between scientists from centuries past”.

Finally, do we use all that knowledge brought to us by these Giant’s of science in daily life? The most recent classic is discussed by Dave Munger, who present an article on how people decide: “Many studies have addressed how people make important decisions like which college to attend, but one of the classics was conducted way back in the 1980s, by a team led by Richard Nisbett”. His post Do we reason with statistics? If so, when, and why? is to be found at Cognitive Daily. He concludes: “Overall, the researchers found that a predisposition to look at data statistically (either because of hint given by the experimenters, the nature of the data, or the nature of the individual’s experience) led to more statistical reasoning.” and adds a nice political twist to it at the very end.

Ok, that’s it for this edition. Next one will be up on June 16th, at the appropriately titled The Secret of Newton”.

Secondly, statistics aficionado Stijn Ruiter writes on his blog ‘Your Sixth Degree’ about the advanced use of statistics. In his post on the presidential elections and the so-called Bradley-effect, he does however show that without asking the right question, advanced statstics does bring you nowhere. The election of Barack Obama denies this Bradley-effect, which “basically refers to the idea that a black American would not get elected because in the election booth voters would decide against what they said in the polls.” However, research should perhaps have a more detailed starting point: “The Bradley effect hypothesis is rather general, and as it is generally described (as above), it does not really specify who the voters are and what characteristics they (should) have. It only specifies whom to choose from, a black candidate or a white candidate. But there are two sides to the voting equation, namely voters and candidates. […] So, the question becomes who votes for whom.” ((Also see Gary King’s note on a paper investgating the (decline) of the Bradley effect.))

Such a detailed perspective was also taken up in an article on the educational achievement of migrants’ children, which I described myself a while ago. “The authors of the article — recently published in American Sociological Review — were able to take into account influences from both (characteristics of) country of origin, country of destination, and the migrant community in the country of origin.” Doing so, has led to some interesting findings, which would remain unclear if not this level of detail was maintained. “Counter-intuitively, immigrant children from countries with lower levels of economic development have better scholastic performance than comparable children who emigrate from countries with higher levels of economic development.”

Also focused on educational attainment of migrants’ children, in relation with integration in the host society, Fëanor on ‘Just a Mon’ discusses a ‘natural experiment’. This natural experiment entails that after Indonesian independence thousands Moluccans were allowed to settle in various Dutch municipalities. The socio-economic backgrounds of these people were rather similar, which allowed the the researchers to compare their children on educational achievement, and cross-tabulate this with measures of integration. They found that “children from Moluccan fathers and native mothers have a higher educational attainment than children from ethnic homogeneous Moluccan couples or children from a Moluccan mother and a native father.”

Finally, a `natural experiment’ is nice, but what about the holy grail of scientific rigourness: a real experiment? Often difficult to achieve in the social sciences, but it has been done. Ed Yong on ‘Not exactly Rocket Science’ discusses an experimental test of the ‘broken windows theory’, “which suggests that signs of petty crimes, like broken windows, serve as a trigger for yet more criminal behaviour”. The science-published article describes how simple experiments were conducted, such as measuring ‘littering’ when a wall was severely tainted by graffiti, or when it was completely painted over. A very interesting article, and Ed Yong gives a thorough summary. “All in all, the suite of experiments, all in a realistic setting, provide powerful evidence that the Broken Windows Theory is valid and all of Keiser’s results were statistically significant”

That’s it for today. No more entries for this first edition of the Curving Normality blog carnival. I would like to thank all those having submitted their entries. It was very nice to read all your blogs and to tie it all together in this editorial. The next edition will be published on the first day of 2009, so please submit your next article in the comments below as soon as it’s ready!

A vast number of carnivals already exist. Fascinating ones and content are found on The Giant’s Shoulders, on classic science papers, Carnival of the Mathematics (although I understand nearly half of it), Four Stone Hearth on anthropology in the widest (American) sense of that word, Cabinet of Curiosities, and The Skeptics Circle.
A longer list is found on Coturnix’s blog.

Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to find a blogging carnival on sociology or social sciences in general. Therefor, I now introduce the Curving Normality Blogging Carnival on Quantitative Social Sciences. It aims at showing of the quality that can be achieved by properly applying quantitative methods, and what these have to offer to the social sciences as sociology, communications sciences, anthropology, economy, development studies, and all that I forget.

For the time being, this website will be the host, and new editions will appear every 1th of the month, with a deadline three days before that. You can write something new, but I’m sure you’ll have some interesting posts lying around just waiting for a larger audience. You can e-mail me, or use the comments below.

So, please send me your links to your posts on quantitative social sciences and find them aggregated in one of the upcoming editions of the Curving Normality Quantitative Social Science Carnival.